Everyone I love must love Mary Oliver. I have no time for those who treat her with derision.

HumpbacksMary Oliver

There is, all around us,this countryof original fire.You know what I mean.The sky, after all, stops at nothing, so somethinghas to be holdingour bodiesin its rich and timeless stables or elsewe would fly away.Off Stellwagenoff the Cape,the humpbacks rise. Carrying their tonnageof barnacles and joythey leap through the water, they nuzzle back under itlike childrenat play.They sing, too.And not for any reasonyou can’t imagine.Three of themrise to the surface near the bow of the boat,then divedeeply, their huge scarred flukestipped to the air.We wait, not knowingjust where it will happen; suddenlythey smash through the surface, someone beginsshouting for joy and you realizeit is yourself as they surgeupward and you see for the first timehow huge they are, as they breach,and dive, and breach againthrough the shining blue flowersof the split water and you see themfor some unbelievablepart of a moment against the sky–like nothing you’ve ever imagined–like the myth of the fifth morning gallopingout of darkness, pouringheavenward, spinning; thenthey crash back under those black silksand we all fall backtogether into that wet fire, youknow what I mean.I know a captain who has seen themplaying with seaweed, swimmingthrough the green islands, tossingthe slippery branches into the air.I know a whale that will come to the boat whenevershe can, and nudge it gently along the bowwith her long flipper.I know several lives worth living.Listen, whatever it is you tryto do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle youlike the dreams of your body,its spiritlonging to fly while the dead-weight bonestoss their dark mane and hurryback into the fields of glittering firewhere everything,even the great whale,throbs with song